Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that consist of multiple photonic devices offer many advantages over those that consist of discrete photonic devices, such as higher efficiency due to the removal of coupling losses between components, fewer packages and packaging steps, smaller size, and overall better performance; however, making each of said devices for these PICs usually requires the execution of many unique processing steps. Such involved and complicated processes are more expensive and tend to have lower yield, as each step incurs some yield loss in fabrication. This is a particular problem for PICs with a large number of components that all must work (in addition to the high number of processing steps). These PICs also tend to have a compromised performance for some or all of the components due to the need to choose a material and process that works for all of the devices that must be fabricated.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.